


s.h.i.e.l.d.

by nimmieamee



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Dementia, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-05
Updated: 2014-09-05
Packaged: 2018-02-16 06:29:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2259456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nimmieamee/pseuds/nimmieamee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"But why are you not wearing any clothes?"</p><p>So tight, so black: like the long undergarments her father wore in the winter. This was not right at all, not appropriate, not proper, and Peggy told her future self so.</p><p>It was her future self. Peggy knew.</p>
            </blockquote>





	s.h.i.e.l.d.

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for a fic prompts meme on tumblr, working from a first line by notababoonbrandishingatick. The line was: "But why are you not wearing any clothes?"
> 
> The depiction of dementia here is sort of vaguely like my grandmother, but also 75% out of my head. It's more about tying into the fic than trying for complete accuracy.

Sometimes Peggy blinked, and something in her rebooted, like a machine. And in those moments she would come to and stare in confusion at the room around her, and pick up the hand mirror on the night table, knocking over all the pill bottles around it. She would look into it. And then she would touch along her cheekbones in wonder, and for a moment she would be afraid.

But when she put the mirror down she would forget again.

Sometimes she escaped from bed, which was a kind of little box that held her fast and promised she could live for a long time yet, which was not really a thing Peggy wanted. It was just a thing that seemed appropriate to people. So she would come up from bed, and, slipping past the room where the tired home attendant slept, she would go down the hallway, and it would seem to her that Gabe had gone to the kitchen again to get a snack. He was not supposed to do this. The doctor had said so. If he kept on doing this they would have to hook him up to a machine until he died.

He hadn’t listened. They had hooked him up to a machine before he’d died. Peggy could not remember it; it only lurked within her like a kind of danger, a fear she couldn’t explain. So she stepped out to the kitchen. She did this every night, always going to save Gabe from the machine, and whenever she passed the sensor at the end of the hallway, a bell would ring, and the home attendant would wake.

But that did not happen.

Peggy’s house was a normal enough house, a twenty-first century house, and there was nothing to say about it. She herself scarcely noticed it. But in the hall there was a figure, an imposing person, who moved very precisely. An agent. Peggy examined this person. When she had been young, she had lived in a high nursery like Wendy Darling, and she and her brothers had discussed what might happen if ever a strange visitor came. She could not remember these discussions. But her brain fell into the grooves of the memory, into the same operating procedures. And so she wasn’t afraid, and she wondered where her brothers were, and she crossed the hall and went to meet the newcomer.

They drew her into the living room, evading the sensor completely. And Peggy could see who it was in the weak light of the window, and she was stunned, because it was herself. Peggy decided that this was her future self. Taller. But she thought she might grow taller, in time, once she left the nursery. And blue-eyed. Well. There were contacts and things people had now; SHIELD had had access to those for some time before the general public did, when they were the cutting edge of espionage, and only slightly ridiculous. And when her future self spoke, she spoke like an American, but then Peggy had lived here for so long that this was to be expected; at some point she would just pick up the local speech patterns.

"But why are you not wearing any clothes?" Peggy said. And got no answer. She tried again.

“Oh, tell me you don’t marry Edgar Dibbons from down the street,” she told her future self. “Don’t. He’s obnoxious. Gabe’s much better.” 

Her future self seemed surprised. 

“Mrs.—Agent— _Director_  Carter,” said her future self. “I thought you might be sleeping.” 

“Oh, no, there’s Brezhnev to think about,” Peggy said, because that made sense at the moment.

Her future self smiled. “Right,” she said. “Listen. This is a long shot. But years and years ago you told your attaché that Councilwoman Hawley on the World Security Council granted all your communications priority access. She wanted you to be able to reach her at all times, with no one getting in the way. She respected you. You helped her. A while back your New York line was disabled. But your attaché—he made sure your DC line to Hawley stayed open.” Then her future self gave a private smile, like  _she_  respected Peggy. This was odd because surely in hindsight Peggy must seem very silly to her. Wasn’t that always the case, when contemplating a past self? But her future self gave no indication of this. She continued. She said, “I always liked that. That you helped her. And others.”

“Well, otherwise it would be even more of a man’s world, and we don’t want that,” Peggy said easily. “Because we can muck it up just as well as they can. No reason to act like we wouldn’t be just as good at it.”

Her future self laughed.

“Well, either way, I need to make a call to Hawley,” she said. “Nick Fury sent me. So can I have that one favor? And then I’ll go.”

Peggy could not place the name. But it didn’t matter. She said to her future self, “Oh no, you can’t go. Not without telling me what happens to us first. You certainly can’t make any calls unless you do that.”

Her future self took on the look of an agent who would absolutely have to do something she didn’t want to. Peggy knew the look well. She was sure she’d worn it several times herself. So she went easy on her poor future self. She said, “Fine. You can make the call. We’ll play a nursery game for it. Secrets for secrets. I played it for years, and that’s why I’m Director. So you pass me a secret, and I pass you one. Only it’s done like a question. You put a question on the front of the paper, and you fold it, and the secret is the answer inside. And if you guess correctly, you win.”

Her future self considered it, then grinned.

“Alright,” she said.

Peggy tried to find the paper and pens. She could not. The room was strange and unfamiliar. Her future self found them – probably knowledge of the house was hidden away in the future. And her future self wrote out: who is this man? And then put something inside the paper that Peggy couldn’t see at first. And Peggy wrote out: what does SHIELD stand for? And wrote her answer.

They swapped papers.

And when her future self guessed, she got it wrong. She didn’t know what SHIELD really stood for. She only knew Howard’s formulation, the party line. But when Peggy guessed, her future self said she got it wrong as well, which was confusing, because Peggy was  _sure_  she knew who the man was.

“That’s okay,” said her future self reassuringly. “It was a longshot. If you could have given us information on him, that would have been something, but it’s okay.”

Her future self was cheating, which was a thing agents had to do sometimes, so Peggy understood. But she still couldn’t countenance it; it was immoral. When her future self was making the call, Peggy stole the paper with the picture on it. Then she turned on the television set. She remembered when Gabe had bought a television. This was not the one he’d bought. It was too flat for that. She wondered when he had replaced it.

Howard was on the television. Howard and a younger wife than Maria, which Peggy frankly disapproved of, and a reporter who kept calling him tony. Howard had always hated that term, and Peggy made a face at the reporter, and resolved to call Howard, because she hadn’t spoken to him in some time. She didn’t notice her future self leave. She’d completely forgotten that her future self had been there at all. She fell asleep in front of the television.

The home attendant woke her hours later and said, “Now it’s the living room, Miss Peggy?” And shook her head and looked disapproving.

“Don’t tell me where I can go in my own house,” Peggy said, annoyed. So the home attendant went to the telephone and called Sharon and the boys to discuss putting sensors in more places.

Peggy sat in bed and discovered there was something in the pocket of her robes. It was a folded piece of paper, like in the secrets game she and her brothers used to play. It said: who is this man?

Peggy opened it up. He looked different. He wore his hair long. His eyes were dull. He was part machine. But it was still him, of course, despite her brothers’ best efforts to conceal him.

“Oh, that’s easy,” she said. “That’s just Sergeant Barnes.”

-

Agent Hill also thought she’d answered correctly, and that the former Director had been cheating. But when she was alone she unfolded the paper. And on the outside it said: what does SHIELD stand for? 

And on the inside it said: So Hubris Infects Every Last Decision.

It had come from a strange part of Peggy, a hidden part. Underneath Peggy’s skin, under her warm red bathrobes, under her fragile paper skin, even, was a kind of naked truth. Peggy didn’t always understand it anymore. Not the now Peggy. But Peggy the first, she who had calculated, and infiltrated, and undermined the Soviets? She who had experimented with the wrong methods? She who had succeeded professionally, become a legend? And yet failed her organization?

She knew.

And sometimes she was still there, that Peggy. The one who’d helped Penny Hawley once, who’d been Howard Stark’s friend, who’d kept a skinny young man in a gilt frame in her drawer.

Peggy the first, Peggy the agent! The naked truth of Peggy.

That woman spoke out sometimes. After all, when Steve had come, and asked himself what she thought, that woman had been there. She’d lurked underneath the surface of this frail new Peggy. And she’d told Steve to start over.

Sometimes things were too rotten. There was no point.


End file.
